Using SD's business savvy to save Ecuador's wilderness

“Hey!” shouts Charles Smith, interrupting my talk with Engelhorn, “isn’t that a fasciated tiger-heron in the rapids down below?”

“Wow! Where?” says Steve Schutz, grabbing his extreme telephoto lens.

Smith and Schutz rush to the down slope side of the bus and I can only think of that — was it a Geico ad? — where the bus tips into the chasm.

“I’m not a birder,” says Engelhorn. “What was your question again?”

“Whether you think the new chancellor of UCSD, Pradeep Khosla, will ignore the biological sciences since he comes from the engineering side of Carnegie-Mellon?”

“I doubt that,” says Engelhorn, who is a member of the director’s cabinet at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “but I’ll ask.”

On a muddy cliff above the Nangaritza Valley, where the Shuar only recently stopped taking heads, I would say we are about 4,000 miles from Sunday, which is only two days away.

San Diego-Ecuador, the vast distance is like an office down the hall to Engelhorn. Keep calm, get the job done, integrate all activities, and have fun. Life, work, conservation, it’s all an entrepreneurial enterprise to him.

Conservation postscript: The president of Ecuador, awe-struck by the brilliant yellow flowering trees of Guayacanes, last month designated the 780,000-acre region a biosphere reserve, partnering with NCI.

Intellectual Capital research assistant Cy Bates contributed to this report. Steve Chapple’s Intellectual Capital covers game-changing people, ideas and perspectives. He can be reached at intellectualcapitalchapple@gmail.com